


La Douleur Exquise!

by Trixen



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 04:36:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4692320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trixen/pseuds/Trixen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oh, the exquisite pain! Veronica, Logan, Wallace, Mac, the Body, and one long hot summer in Neptune.</p>
            </blockquote>





	La Douleur Exquise!

Summer is bee season in Neptune.   
  
Veronica _hates_ being stung. In the afternoons, she sneaks over to Wallace’s, avoiding the hive beneath his front porch. His swing is so soft that Veronica sinks into it and in the dark heat of the overhang, she drinks lemonade, the taste cuttingly cool inside her mouth. Wallace shoots hoops, the ball smashing off the asphalt. He is angry about Jackie, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. That suits Veronica just fine. If they talked, he’d ask her how she’s doing, and she’d have to tell him and that isn’t an option. He might hug her.  
  
Veronica flinches at the thought.   
  
The lemonade leaves a hot tang in her mouth for hours. Often they sit in front of the television screen as the days blur along the edges, and they watch Molly Ringwald movies on TBS or _Fast Times at Ridgemont High_ and that’s the one Veronica likes the best, because everybody is so clueless and everybody is searching and yet the movie doesn’t _hurt_.   
  
“I bet Spicoli’d never get left high n’ dry at JFK,” Wallace mumbles, his head nearly hidden by a giant pillow. “How could that girl not tell me about her kid?”  
  
“A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets,” she quotes seriously. “Damn that line is good. We should put _Titanic_ on the Blockbuster list.”  
  
He ignores her. “Should we invite your friend over?”  
  
“Mac?”  
  
“You don’t have any other friends, V.”  
  
She throws a piece of popcorn in his general direction. It pings once and lands on the floor. “Blasphemy!”  
  
“So should we or what?”  
  
“Mac is…” her voice breaks a bit. “Mac is not dealing.”  
  
“Like _you_ are,” he drawls.  
  
“Do you really want to hurt me, Wallace?” she whispers, and a kernel of popcorn nestles in his hair. “Do you really want to make me cry?”  
  
“Is her hair still that weird, like—“  
  
“Brown?”  
  
“Yeah but shittier.”  
  
“Do you mind? I’m eating.” She pauses. “It’s brown. Plus she’s wearing… cardigans.”  
  
“I saw her yesterday and damn, that girl looks like she got lost on her way to –“ he gestures to a preview flashing across the screen, “her Breakfast Club meetin’. She’s gone _Clare_ on us.”  
  
“And then some.”   
  
“I wonder if Jackie—“  
  
Wallace starts to ramble and Veronica closes her eyes, letting her head fall back against the couch cushions. Her hair is a dead weight against her neck and she aches to cut it off, start afresh with razored layers and bangs set to sting. How can she fault Mac for trying to become a different person? She knows that her friend believes the pain will go away if she is just.not.herself. A different body, a different life. But it’s all a lie.  
  
Just like the funeral, and that didn’t help matters anyway. It was a joke, from start to finish. Hundreds of people crammed into the damp, sweaty Church on the edge of town -- _Our Lady of Sorrows_ and Veronica sat in the back with Mac, holding her hand and whispering _it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay_ because sometimes she has trouble shutting herself up. The air in the space felt crisp, regurgitated. Two dots of red appeared on the side of her shirt, and when Veronica looked down, she realized her tazer wounds had opened up again.   
  
“Come to the burial with me?” Mac pleaded, and Veronica couldn’t refuse.  
  
It was a mistake, of epic proportions.   
  
Dick tried to push the priest into the deep darkness of the hole. No one was quite sure why, but he kept screaming – _his name is not fucking **Cassidy**_ – and punched Logan in the eye when his friend attempted to wrestle him down to the ground. His ring left a slash across Logan’s brow, and in that gaping wound, Veronica saw his frailty, the subterranean Loganblood and layers of flesh and she felt sick. There was a smear on Dick’s ring, and it looked like guts.   
  
“I never knew Cassidy was Catholic,” was all Mac could say.   
  
The girls slipped away soon after. They bought ice cream cones and tequila (from a sympathetic Wallace) and walked along the edge of the water, so that grainy sand got between their toes. Seagulls keened in the sky and tears wetted Mac’s face, and tears wetted Veronica’s face, and neither of them were crying for the same reasons, but they held hands anyway. They left the ice cream to melt by the shore and when Mac walked into the water up to her elbows, Veronica followed, and they swam in their black dresses, the mourning silk wrapping them and unwrapping them as the blue sea swelled.  
  
Afterward, she went to Logan’s. Her feet squelched in her shoes when she walked and there was a long ribbon of kelp in her hair. His eyebrow was still bleeding, torn open. He hadn’t bothered to bandage it. She remembered the sick falling feeling in her belly, and covered it with ointment.   
  
“I’m considering letting it scar. Goin’ for the devil-may-care look.”  
  
“Would that involve an eye patch? I’ve never been into pirates.”   
  
“So that rumor about you and the football team isn’t true?” His voice was soft. Picking her up, he pressed his mouth against her ear and sucked a bead of salt water from the lobe.   
  
“You’re keeping the bandage on."  
  
He breathed. “God you’re a pest.”   
  
He laid her out on clean sheets and spread her legs, _looked_ at her. It embarrassed Veronica, still embarrasses her, how he enjoys _looking_. Her body is not something she concentrates on. The mechanics of it, its mysteries, the menstrual blood and the smells, it eludes her. But Logan loves it all. That afternoon, after they buried Cassidy six feet deep in moist earth, he explored her slowly, carefully, his fingers searching her out until there was nowhere left to hide. She was sore, spread wide, salted, and when she came, her head ached afterward.   
  
His arms wrapped around her, and she felt his penis hard and hot against the wet skirt of her dress. She kissed him, hoped he would understand why she hadn’t let him inside of her yet. How she could bear his fingers, the press of his palm, but his body made her feel spun down into dust, a powder, not Veronica at all. She wept, thinking of how they had all been invaded by Cassidy and his sperm, wriggling obscene things. She thought of how Mac would lie, untouched, in bed that night. Logan’s taste for bitter tears had not waned, and he licked them away, whispering nonsense and the nonsense meant he understood.   
  
“I miss Mac,” she says softly, now, thinking of dead girls and their dreams. For it is as if she has lost two friends, two separate lives. “Maybe we should invite her to movie night.”  
  
“I already suggested that. Don’t you ever listen to me, girl?”  
  
“I don’t have a choice, Wallace,” she says sweetly. “You never, ever shut up.”  
  
“Yeah, yeah, you’d miss me if I was gone, Mars.”  
  
+  
  
When the nights get too hot and she can’t sleep and she’s counted one thousand sheep too many; when even the sound of Lianne’s music box cannot lull her into dreams, Veronica writes letters to Duncan. She likes the idea of words that will never reach him, likes the way the ink stains her fingers, how it releases the threads of her nightmares. It is soothing, how dry the act is, just paper and pen and words.   
  
Sometimes her letters are factual, slightly humorous, a way of speaking to someone, anyone, who has not been in Neptune for the madness and its fallout.   
  
_Have I said thank you yet for offing Aaron Echolls? Oh, don’t look so shocked, I know you did it. Did I tell you my Dad bailed on me? He’s working for Kendall Casablancas and he won’t even tell me what for. What else… oh, I broke up with Logan again. I’m tired of men disappointing me. No offence._  
  
Sometimes she cannot help but reminisce, as if it makes anything easier. As if it wasn’t rotten to the core even then, as if Lilly’s death did not do anything but bring that seething to the surface.   
  
_Remember the parties we used to have? Champagne foaming and Lilly teasing and we all laughed so much…_  
  
Sometimes the paper is filled with feverish gasps and it is all she can do to get her breaths out of the iron band that seems to have settled over her throat.   
  
_I can’t seem to do anything right and I miss you so much and I don’t miss you at all and how can that be, really? But it is. I miss you because you didn’t occupy my thoughts, you weren’t consuming. I don’t know why I do the things I do. I don’t know why I want to cut my hair off, or why I want to run away to Stanford, or why I hate that Logan moved out of the Grand and didn’t tell me. When I broke up with him, we were sitting at the kitchen island, eating soup and the sun went in, and suddenly they looked like bowls of blood and I just couldn’t be with him anymore. I’ve certainly developed a taste for the metaphor, huh? He’s your best friend, can’t you explain him to me? Forget it, I’m sorry. I just miss the days when I wasn’t so scared. When things weren’t so painful. I miss the days when I believed in happy endings_.   
  
She thanks God no one will never see these letters. She wonders why she is thanking God. After all, he put her in this skin, and there isn’t a way out.   
  
+  
  
Veronica gets stung by a bee on the last day of July, on her way to Java the Hut. She knows the bee is in the car from the beginning of the drive, but she is late for work and can’t stop. It is worse, the anticipation of the sting. But she still swears loudly, acidly and almost drives off the road when it actually happens. The honeybee gets beneath her work skirt, slip slides up to her inner thigh, investigates the tender flesh there, the secret flesh, and stings her and dies. She feels the gentle plop of its body and tears hurt her eyes. She hates the way she is always crying now, like a _girl_ or something.  
  
Work is irritating, her sting smarting, and the guy who asks for a latte won’t shut up. He wants a shot of conversation with his French vanilla flavoring and Veronica isn’t in the mood. She is opening her mouth to say that he is the poster boy for verbal diarrhea when his words send a rattlesnake snap of shock through her body.   
  
“Did you hear that Logan Echolls is dead?”  
  
Veronica knocks over the latte she was preparing. Foam sloshes over the side of the counter and she grabs the guy by the collar of his shirt. But her grip feels weak, even to her.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Heard it on the news,” he says, bewildered. “Access Hollywood. Wild, huh? That whole family is f—“  
  
Veronica throws up. One second she is staring at him, inches away, and the next there is milk and cornflakes on the floor, her morning rushing up to meet her. Thin strings of spit on her lips and she feels unzipped, guts bare. For a moment she expects to look down and see her intestines spilling onto the floor. There is puke in her hair and it looks like baby food. Her whole body is rejecting his words, the spasms burning up her nerves and into her chest. Her nipples feel bitten, bloody, her insides empty.   
  
“How…”  
  
But the guy is gone and the staff is crowding around her, concern and disgust on their faces. No one likes vomit. One of the nicer waitresses cleans her up with a damp piece of paper towel. It feels cool, moist, slightly grainy. It tickles her eyelashes and the waitress strokes the back of her neck, trying to stop the shudders that are ripping through Veronica’s body. But she knows it really can’t be helped. This has been coming since Cassidy ripped into her and made his penis and his skin part of her memory. He is the King of her Stigmata, and she feels every point in which he touched her.  
  
And now, if Logan is dead.   
  
Veronica drives to the beach house. She isn’t even crying. She thinks it is funny that he moved and didn’t tell her, perhaps thinking she wouldn’t realize it. What _he_ doesn’t realize is that she knows everything that goes on in this town. So how could he die and expect her not to find out?   
  
When he opens the door, his hair is sticking up and he is still obviously walking in dreams. His eyes are drowsy, half-lidded and he reaches up to rub the spot behind his ear. She can’t help it. She punches him. Not very hard, but he still flinches.  
  
“Nice to see you too,” he mumbles. “Won’t you come in?”   
  
“You won’t get away with being a flippant asshole, Logan, I thought you were _dead_.”  
  
“Tragically, no.” His wrist swishes dramatically. “Do I have to ask again? Come in. Erase, rewind. Why are you here?”  
  
“I thought you were—some guy said—“  
  
“Vicious rumor,” he answers, letting her pass into the hallway, which is flooded with light. “Started by one of my fans, I’m sure.”  
  
“If you knew, why didn’t you call me and—“  
  
“Read the sign language, Veronica,” he places two fingers diagonally across each other. “We are _ex_.”  
  
Tears sting her eyes for the second time that day and she smells him, sleep-warm. The door to his bedroom is ajar and the sight of the bed makes her feel hot and strange. She knows Logan sees the tears brightening her eyes, but he doesn’t comment.  
  
“I’m scared,” she admits quietly.  
  
“The world is a freaky place,” Logan agrees. “What’s the matter? You didn’t have Duncan on speed dial? Couldn’t run back to him?”  
  
“This never had anything to do with Duncan.”  
  
“Could’ve fooled me,” he says beneath his breath. “Besides, I’m sure the grass is greener on his side of the fence.”  
  
“I could have gone with him,” she reminds him.  
  
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”  
  
“Real mature, Logan.”   
  
“What the fuck, Veronica? You broke up with _me_.”  
  
A flare behind her eyelids and she remembers his blood on Dick’s fingers. “I didn’t want to lose you.”  
  
“Is that some kind of girl logic, because I don’t follow. Plus this conversation is beginning to bore me, so…”  
  
Her breath is coming in short, fast spurts and she knows she just has to _say_ it because he has put up steel to keep her out, and so she whispers it, “I love you” and gets on her tip-toes to kiss him.  
  
He tastes of shock, and he rears back. “Veronica. You shouldn’t say that.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Because it isn’t true.”  
  
“I don’t lie.”  
  
“You just did.”  
  
“Not about this.”  
  
“Veronica…” he whispers as her voice breaks and he kisses her, cupping her face with his hands.  
  
When he unwraps her in the darkened, sun-hot bedroom and there is nothing between them but skin and sweat, she gasps and tries to breathe, because he is bigger than she is used to and there is pain. The strength and heat frightens her, but he tries to be gentle, and finally, she is moving, helping him, letting him put her legs up over his shoulders so that he may go deep and hard until it is that beautiful blank she has sought for months, years.  
  
Sliding down until he is kneeling between her legs, Logan covers her bee sting with his mouth and his breath burns as he sucks the poison out.   
  
**~Finis**


End file.
